‘Love Objects’ Shine but Do Not Include Artist’s Wheelchair

When he left Mississippi in 1967, Geer Morton wanted to paint huge, angry murals protesting the racism he had witnessed there during two years of civil rights work. Police dogs attacking helpless black children, Southern whites brutalizing innocent black men and women.

Morton’s anger was, and still is, authentic. But violence and social comment never found a voice on his canvas. What flows more naturally from his brushes are the daily, commonplace wonders he calls “little love objects.” A disorderly desk, a favorite rural porch view, garden roses on a Union Jack, an elderly neighbor. He exalts them on his canvasses like paeans to a lover.

Bearded and bespectacled, Morton, 54, has gained increasing national recognition for his crude, color-splashed portrayals of those love objects, muscular paintings that seem to divulge more from a distance than up close. Shows in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver have all met with success. His latest paintings are on display through Saturday at Tarbox Gallery in La Jolla.

But the one thing Morton has yet to paint is his wheelchair, which for nearly 30 years has been more an object of his contempt than love.

“It’s certainly not a ‘love object’ yet,” Morton said, sitting in his wheelchair outside his Mission Hills studio.

An automobile accident at age 24 left both of Morton’s legs paralyzed. Since then, he has shunned public use of his wheelchair, preferring to maneuver his lanky frame around on leg braces and forearm crutches. And, though he produces many of his paintings from his wheelchair, it has never accompanied him to any exhibit openings. The opening reception at Tarbox Gallery was no exception.

“I think I wasn’t friends with my wheelchair,” Morton said. “I saw it as a symbol of being crippled, and I didn’t want to look at that too often. I could face it for short periods of time. But there was a lot of resentment about that. Still is.”

Morton speaks mostly in the past tense because he is slowly loosening the knot of fear and bitterness that kept him from truly accepting his paralysis. Since his wife’s death three years ago, Morton has been on a painful journey of self-discovery--”in the pit of enormous change,” as he put it--from which his wife and years of alcoholism protected him.

For starters, Morton abandoned alcohol. To the dismay of one New York art dealer, he even swore off making “booze paintings,” still-lifes that include bottles of booze. A collection of 50 or 60 of the paintings sold quite well at the dealer’s exhibit several years ago.

Morton also has stopped avoiding people with severe physical disabilities. He recently joined the Challenge Center in El Cajon, a workout facility for the physically disabled.

“I didn’t want to identify, and now I do,” he said. “I steered clear of (disabled people). I found other people’s handicaps embarrassing. That’s embarrassing to say.”

Morton’s resentment over his disability didn’t begin to melt until this year, when he saw a photograph of his studio taken by his companion, Joan Crone. With no prior arranging, Crone captured his empty wheelchair resting in the center of the studio near a self-portrait. The wheelchair seemed as much Morton as his physical self.

“That startled me, and yet I was touched by it,” he said. “It was a statement of acceptance. . . . Seeing the photograph was a gift to me.”

Oddly, Morton never would have become an artist were it not for the accident that put him in a wheelchair. At the time, he was studying politics and government at the University of Colorado, after three years in the Army. As an honors student he was able to audit any class he wanted; he found himself drawn to the art classes. He also discovered an enormous talent.

Reevaluating his career after the accident, Morton decided to attend art school and pursue a profession in painting.

“As long as I could walk and run and ski, and feel competitive, I could treat my talent as something superfluous, as a luxury, a bonus that could be spent or not spent,” he said. “I had a sense afterwards that it was time I looked at that gift in a serious way.”

But very little in his life to that point had even hinted at a career in art.

“If I had a list of 250 attractive occupations, painting wasn’t on it,” he said.

Even after training at the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute, Morton never quite believed that painting had become his profession. Artists were flamboyant and bohemian, he thought, not conservative and introspective as he was. Artists lived in big cities, aggressively pursuing the artistic fads du jour. He lived in the Northern California countryside, toiling at his personal view of art.

“It took me 20 years of being a practicing artist to call myself an artist,” he said, dressed in his customary paint-speckled green fatigues and plaid flannel shirt. “I just never thought of myself as one. And I really still today don’t think of myself as an artist. Finally, I call myself an artist because I know I am.”

Morton recently left his country home and studio to live part time in San Diego. He also spends several months a year in rural Maine, where he grew up.

It was in Maine that his art career might have been preordained. His earliest memory there is of himself as a 1 1/2-year-old toddler staring awe-struck at the circles of sunshine glowing on the Oriental rug where he lay.

“I’m still looking at the sun in that way,” he said. “The shadows, and the combination of shots of sunlight surrounded by spots of shadow, are my earliest memories, and they’re the subject of my work today.”

Light and shadow, space and tension--those are the pieces of the puzzle Morton wrestles with in each painting.

“Just like in our love lives, the interest for us is in the space between us,” he said. “It’s the space between objects, as the space between lovers, that makes life work.”

Eighteen years of life in the country gave Morton plenty of space to work with. There, he and his wife lived self-sufficiently, building their own house, raising sheep and other farm animals, bringing up three children.

But the country never cultivated in him the patience that often accompanies a slower-paced rural life style. He paints speedily and rarely spends more than an afternoon on one painting. He hates to retouch a canvas, preferring instead to let the sensual image hang on its initial inspiration.

“Like I’m a sloppy eater, I’m a sloppy painter,” he said. “Things dribble here and there. It’s not that I disregard neatness, it’s that I’m in a hurry--it takes one too much time and thought to be neat. The sun is always going down or the wind is blowing or I’m cold, or something.”

Morton can be as relentlessly critical of himself as he is of his work. Self-descriptions almost always yield a list of negative traits encased in a self-mocking sense of humor. He once likened himself to his 2-year-old grandson: “full of sound and fury, blubbering . . . bitching, grumbling, commenting on stuff, pointing and demanding . . . dropping stuff on the floor.”

Morton said he is trying to use the deeper self-revelations of the last couple of years to add intimacy and patience to his work, to remove more masks so that raw images and ideas will flow through him like a psychic medium onto the canvas.

“I’m hoping that there will be an honesty in my work that was only there in unusual moments,” he said.

Already, people familiar with his work through the last two decades, say they’ve noticed his recent work blossoming like the idealized flowers he loves to paint.

“His work always had sort of a very spontaneous quality, but it was a little moody,” said Lisa Dubins, owner of Dubins Gallery in Los Angeles. “The mood seems more mature now. There’s more of a confidence, though he was always a bold painter.”

So far, however, any new openness in his painting hasn’t extended to his wheelchair. In attempting to explain why he hasn’t yet painted it, Morton tried several avenues of escape. He doesn’t want to clutter his work with irrelevant social comment. He doesn’t often paint machines. Many of his inanimate subjects are antique.

“Would I be more inclined to paint a 1910 wheelchair than a new one?” he asked, predicting the next question. “Nah, probably not.”

In the end, it came down to how Morton views his wheelchair--both literally and figuratively.

“So much of the pleasure of painting is being immersed in the pleasure of vision,” he said. “With a scene I’d like to paint, I want to take it inside me. I want to reach out my arms, gather it all to me and make it part of myself.”

Objectively, he conceded that his wheelchair possesses the graceful curves and supple lines that he requires of his subjects. And he can see the way the soft San Diego sunlight reflects from its metal arms in a way that on any other subject might captivate him. But the thing is still too personally repugnant--too much a symbol of limitations--for him to visually appreciate.

“I’m not sure what I want to think about my wheelchair at this point,” he said. “These are very painful questions that I’ve been asking myself. I guess it’s something to look at and do and see where it takes me. It would be a step.”